April 2007 Archives

My God, it's almost 11 15 a.m. and on this Saturday I haven't exercised, the day is building up a meteorological head of steam, the temperature hurtling toward the 80s. So I get on my rowing machine, go nowhere fast for 100, then 200, strokes, get off the thing, score some nuts at Trader Joe's, then rush to the day's event. A lunch for tutors. I am one of the latter, and, therefore, due to be feted at this luncheon in the library basement. I can't help thinking as I hurtle librarywards in my wheelchair that this is a feeble excuse for an occupation. There was a time when I did serious things, ghostwriting speeches, authoring press releases, phoning journalists. Now I tutor, a Tongan woman with three kids and no husband, on how to read, speak and write American English. Pretty soon I'll join the Rotary Club. Maybe get into disabled shuffleboard. Retirement.

Surely, one was supposed to RSVP concerning this potluck. But frankly I can't recall if I have or haven't responded. I'm simply turning up at the last minute, bearing nuts. In my mind, there is every excuse. The in-laws are here. Marlou has been in the hospital. Distractions. Yesterday we drove to Half Moon Bay, a pull-out-all-the-stops trip that takes all of 30 minutes on a reasonably good traffic day. So much going on in this, my 61st year. There's a sign for the Tutor Appreciation Luncheon at the library entrance. I hit the elevator down button.

The meeting room is jammed, not so much with people, but with food. I notice this right away. I am not one to overlook food. And here in California where most people being tutored began life speaking Spanish, the board is groaning with chicken taquitos, beef enchiladas, frijoles refritos, not to mention a vast amount of ensalada. The room is full of women. Hard to say why this is. Men certainly have as much need to learn English as anyone else. And surely men are just as good at teaching. Nevertheless, we are in short supply here. In fact, we are grouped together, a minority at the end of one table, the testosterone ghetto.

I head for the other table, seating myself by Juanita, Imelda and Elsa. They are, it turns out, the events committee. Once I have wolfed down an extremely non-dietary load of enchiladas, these three women have my full attention. They are standing by the microphone, shyly and proudly, being introduced by the Project Read manager. Each delivers a prepared statement. None has a grasp of the microphone, correct speaking distance or the general impact of amplification. I can see how it is for these women. All are middle-aged, learning English late in life, an uphill journey. And they are so determined. Each woman reads us her story. This one wants to be able to speak to her daughters in English. That one needs to converse with her doctor. The other wants to read the San Francisco Chronicle. Such modest goals, all of them, and so easily comprehensible to someone who had to learn to walk again at age 21, hold a pen, manage a fork.

I rolled over here in a big hurry, half thinking I would leave early. And now that the presentation is over, I am staying late. Here it's all about human aspiration, mine and theirs. The English learners want to be a part of things, and so do I. In a room like this, chairs and tables awkwardly crowded, my wheelchair cannot advance without banging and scraping. I am an electromechanical bull in a china shop. Too bad. As the project director just explained, public speaking is the worst human fear. And if these women can get up before a microphone, reading "just" as "yust," and keep their dignity, so can I. This is how we give.

I haven't heard from my Tongan tutee in days. She canceled our last meeting at the library. I left several messages on her mobile phone (she doesn't have one at her house). But no response. Never mind, I tell myself rolling out of the library, stuffed with enchiladas, communal spirit and hope. I'll call her myself. In fact, I'll keep calling until we get to the bottom of things. She's a single mom, I'm an aging cripple, and it's a beautiful day. Hot, yes. But I've done my exercise. I've taken care of things.

If I roll my electric wheelchair at excessive speeds on the way to Stanford Hospital's E3 wing, it's because I'm trying to get the experience over. The surgical ward has the approximate layout of gopher holes, subterranean in feel, branching and rebranching. And I don't like seeing Marlou crammed into the windowless corner of her room, hearing the roommate's endless pleas for a bed pan. Worse, I don't like seeing her face puffy and pale, her expression sad and lost. But I try to remember that this is all temporary, a moment in a brightening plot, and the coming scenes will be vital and joyous. Which gives me the luxury of absorbing these bedside moments, extracting whatever lessons they hold, while feeling positive about tomorrow.

Marlou is in pain. Her back hurts, she says. The assistant surgeon had come by in the morning, his surgical nurse in tow. He gave orders for Marlou to get up and start walking. Always a good idea, I believe, recalling my early days of quadriplegia. But there she is, still abed, back aching, and no one has come by to disconnect her tubes, rotate her to the side of the bed and get Marlou on her feet. It's still difficult for Marlou to speak, and in between short volleys of words, her eyes sink into something cloudy and hopeless.

This unsettles me just enough to think. How life has brought me here, in my long search for mothering and caring, and now it's my turn to do both. Which is what nature intends, and when Marlou picks up the mothering-caring mantle once again, things will be different. Maybe I will understand our true strengths, not take our roles so much for granted, be more appreciative and less automatic.

For now, there's work to do. Marlou doesn't like bothering people. And, truth to tell, neither do I. Until I reach a certain point of desperation or, as in this moment, feel the call. It's a call to action, a particularly male action, which has to do with hacking a path through the forest, dealing with the highwaymen, and generally advancing and protecting. All of which emerges as my feeble observation that Marlou would be better sitting in the chair next her bed. Maybe I'll get some help, I say. Marlou rolls her eyes. The hospital is completely messed up. Pressing the call button produces a response from the nursing station, but little else. She has been waiting hours to be lifted from the bed. Where are these people? This hospitalization, she says, is much worse than the last.

Marlou doesn't like me to take over. She wants to handle things herself. She wants space. I'm about to make another gentle suggestion, seek her buy in, and make sure she feels part of the process. Except, this is ridiculous. It's the interpersonal equivalent of political correctness. I'm tired of worrying about being right. I'm worrying about my wife. She has, after all, an underlying diagnosis of mild rheumatoid arthritis. A little joint mobilization really wouldn't hurt. A little mobilization wouldn't hurt me either.

The nursing assistant wanders in for the hourly check. I tell him Marlou needs to get out of bed. He mumbles something and leaves. Now her surgeon strides through the door, all suited and followed by the medical entourage. I listen respectfully to his account of the surgery, how there was one miniscule area of suspicion, now ablated with an infrared instrument. No need to throw a hand grenade at your liver, he tells Marlou. A few shots at all angles from a BB gun was all it took. Now, he wants to go. I can tell, being something of a medical veteran myself. Marlou forces a smile and tells him she is quite appreciative. My wife's back hurts, I tell the surgeon. A silence. Now a slight shifting of gears as the surgical nurse, the one who had promised to get Marlou up and walking earlier in the day, rustles her clipboard. Didn't we get her up, the surgeon asks? Everyone agrees it's on the schedule. The surgeon observes that hospital beds are notoriously uncomfortable. All drift out the door, hurrying to something much more urgent than this patient who has only the slightest wisp of cancer remaining.

I'm holding Marlou's hand. Hard to know what else to do in the silence. It's hard to believe our good news, I tell her. But it is good, in fact, wonderful. Marlou tells me she was very scared. I nod. Worse than scared, she says. I tell her I know this, that the presence of an aggressive cancer in a vital organ would terrify anyone. Underneath this I feel the sadness of our mutual self protection. Neither of us can quite open up about certain things. Life experience has left us with a legacy of distrust. Now, in the new normal, maybe we can believe in each other. We have the gift of time to do that. Sad and not sad.

I have to be on my rowing machine, take Marlou's parents out to dinner, and get out of this oppressive hospital. Back in a second, I tell Marlou. In the hallway, I make a phone call or two. Arranging a physiotherapy appointment. Setting up a lunch. Am I really going to do the next thing, interfering, taking over, upstaging Marlou? I'm at the nursing station before I can think. There's the surgical nurse at a screen, the assistant surgeon standing beside her, everyone in earshot. My wife was expecting to get up hours ago, I say, bright as a bell. It's in the orders, I add. Yes, yes, the nurse says, eyes unwavering on the screen, voice clipped. Big deal, for into every life a little clippage must fall. And way cool being able to say "my wife," having spent much of my life without one, particularly a real one.

I've got one more phone call to make, a long-delayed smog check. I roll back into Marlou's room, and damned if she isn't leaning on the arm of a nursing assistant. And now she and an IV stand are beginning to roll. Right out the door, the nurse's arm around her, up the hall, over the carpet and through the woods. I'm in a hurry. Passing them in the hall, I blow a kiss over my shoulder. Goodbye dear, I say, my work is done here. A joke that isn't.

In June, 1968, recently shot, paralyzed and too terrified to sleep, I spent days and nights in a half world of sounds. Visitors, cranking beds, rattling hospital carts, venetian blinds going up and down, all of it blended together, including the sounds of Robert Kennedy's funeral underway on some television down the hall. A few days into this, I could barely tell one thing from another, and the eulogies, commentary and background stories on the Washington cortege began to blur into my reality. With the mind adrift, the Kennedy funeral felt like my own, not an unpleasant sensation, but light and persistent. In retrospect, I was probably shaking off anesthesia from my emergency neck surgery.

All this came back to me as I leaned over Marlou's hospital bed this afternoon. Her surgery was over, successful, and there she was, coming round to consciousness, then deciding sleep was better. She had that option, which is a good thing. She was feeling some pain, she said, in her back. I offered to talk to the nurse, to explain that Marlou might be having some low back and hip pain. But, no, this pain was in the upper back, Marlou said. Probably referred pain, she added. With this comment, I knew she was back among us, conscious, self-aware and headed in the right direction. Home.

It's a dim experience, the post surgical one. The patient is out of it. And so are the well-wishers. There is not much anyone can do. Conversation is almost hopeless, then expands by increments. Until conversation is all there is. Unless you and the patient watch television together, God forbid...an activity that is demonstrably bad for your health, invariably bothers the person in the adjoining bed and echoes unpleasantly with the hollowness of life. Never mind. Anesthesia is better than television.

So, what is the visitor to do but pay attention to the surroundings? Surely the interior spaces at Stanford Hospital don't have to feel like a submarine or a bomb shelter or a factory. All you need is a window here and there, and maybe in the next incarnation some architect will figure this out. Interiority is bad for your health, as any introvert can attest. It's not even too much fun having an aisle seat, as it were, the inside position away from the window in what hospitals hilariously refer to as a semiprivate room. Good thing Marlou was into post-anesthesia this afternoon when the patient across the mid-room curtain turned the volume up on some soap opera. Bad for your health.

On the way to Marlou's room, I shared an elevator with a thirtyish black man, slightly rotund, who asked me about the book on my lap. I said it was about a man who was shot. British, he asked? He'd seen BBC on the cover of Frank Gardner's book about getting gunned down in Riyadh by Al Qaeda. Later, I found the man leaning against a wall by the men's room. He said it was important for quadriplegics to get out, that he took his buddy to see basketball games in Oakland. Otherwise the friend would just be in bed, he said. I asked what happened to his buddy. Actually I already knew, or strongly suspected.

Spinal cord injuries just don't occur anymore, at least not they way they used to. First seat belts, then air bags, shaved the auto crash percentages way down. Whole hospital wards emptied out. But guns and drug wars brought the numbers back up soon enough. Today spinal cord injuries in California occur almost entirely within minority populations in the inner cities. The man leaning against the wall told me his friend had been shot. How, I asked? Point-blank, he said, calmly. I volunteered that I had been shot too. So had he, the man added, 20 times. How did that happen, I asked? He gave the same sort of answer. With a pistol, 9 mm. I rolled inside the men's room.

I'm 60 years old now and understand that war is a fairly constant state of human affairs. Our street wars claim all the wrong people, of course, such as myself. But perhaps this can be said for all wars. News from the black man in the hallway neither surprised nor frightened me. This created a space, a needed space, enough for the news from Marlou to sink in.

For the day had had at its center a minor mystery.

While Marlou was under the knife, I simply had to get away. Too much interiority at Stanford Hospital. Marlou's parents and I headed to the local haute supermarket cafe for a blast of cardiovascular quiche, all cheesy, creamy and rich. I felt better after this experience, though still tired. I had gotten up at 4 a.m. to get Marlou to her 5:30 a.m. appointment with the anesthesiologist. I hadn't slept well the night before. Or the night before that. Or the year before that. Still, I berated myself repeatedly when I finally made it back to the hospital, having wedged my van into a non-handicapped space in the full Stanford medical parking structure. I had missed the surgeon. Marlou had come out of surgery, and her doctor had come out of the operating room when I wasn't there. Four hours, the nurse had told me as they wheeled Marlou's bed away from the prep area that morning. To be cautious, I'd made it back 3 1/2 hours later. But I hadn't been cautious enough. I'd missed the surgeon, I'd missed the action, I'd missed finding out what I found out hours later. After a nap, doing some work, attending an evening meeting...and hearing Marlou's parents trundle up the wheelchair ramp to our apartment. They had gotten the full story.

The assistant surgeon had been by that afternoon and told Marlou. The doctors hadn't removed anything of her liver. The area that had once shown signs of cancer cells now wasn't showing signs of anything. Except being a liver. And being doctors, they decided to give it a quick cauterization. A blast or two from a tiny laser. And that was it. Which is why the whole thing was over early. Which is why the other thing, Marlou's life, isn't going to be over early. As far as one can see. And one doesn't have to see all that far. Life is full of guns and injuries and airbags and chemotherapy, and things sag here and expand there. There are cycles. There is a rebound.

The couple strolling down the shared dock of our Inverness cottage walk, dress and talk like tourists. From our wooden deck I watch them ascend the three ramshackle steps from their wooden deck. Seeing me, the middle-aged man, shirt and trousers bulging in a way that is becoming all too familiar, asks if I mind. No, I tell them, it's yours, it's ours. Two rented cottages, side-by-side, sharing a single splintering boardwalk. OK, they say, trundling off. I shake my head in disbelief. How did Inverness get this way? And what is "this way?" Furthermore, what better "way" should Inverness get?

First, go to the original. Inverness, Invernesshire, about 1980 via British Rail. By the time you arrive, at least you'll know why so many Britons were not sorry, initially, to see the last of their state railways. The overnight sleeper left Euston Station around 10 p.m. It entered the Scottish Highlands at dawn where a lone buck stood proud beside the hilly tracks showing off its antlers as if posing for a whiskey label. There was no dining car on the train, so it was a good thing we were due at Inverness early. And equally unfortunate when the train came to a permanent halt. An hour went by, a long time on a British train...though admittedly nothing on, say, Amtrak. I got dressed and hobbled down the corridor in search of someone who knew something. A young man wearing a badly stained British Rail jacket brushed by me in the corridor. He was not about to make eye contact and not above body contact, being grossly overweight. And being in a British-Rail-savvy frame of mind, I more or less shouted my question into his face: why were we stopped? He emitted three syllables. Loco's bust.

Did this sour me on Inverness, Scotland? By the time I got there, I was starving. With the train from London arriving late, the northbound departure for Wick was delayed. Not by much, mind you, but barely enough time for a starving cripple to wander out to the street and get a brief look at the center of Inverness. Yes, the skies were gray. This was Scotland, after all. But so was the mood. The low stone buildings seemed to have escaped decades of British anti-soot scrubbings. People scurried about the streets looking poor and rather downtrodden. The shops had modest goods, the restaurants dire. I did what any sensible traveler would do. I bought a Cadbury's whole nut bar and headed back to the train station. Inverness, 1980.

Inverness, California, 2007. It's impossible to say what the two Invernesses share except, maybe, Scotch Broom. The latter is abloom in naughty yellow up and down the California coast, though being an invasive species, we shun it. We disapprove of it. We denounce it. Aside from this roadside shrub, the two towns may have shared, at one point, a certain genteel poverty. This is only a guess, but I know there was a time when Inverness had nothing fancy. As a university student, the town was a place to buy a sandwich on the way to the newly opened Point Reyes National Seashore. The latter was something of an experiment in the National Park system, mixing wild and agricultural lands in one preserve. With the winding roads, getting there wasn't as easy as other Bay Area beaches. The Seashore attracted few visitors at first, and some thought it was a joke. In August, 1967, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page photo of South Beach, one of the parking-lot-and-picnic-spot developments awaiting the tourist crowds. The South Beach parking lot was completely empty.

Nowadays Point Reyes is thick with hikers, campsites full all summer, so many tourists clamoring to see the lighthouse that the park has created a special shuttle. You leave your car at, yes, South Beach, if there's a space. You'd think that Inverness could easily swell to meet the tourist challenge. But swelling is not what Inverness is all about. Quelling is the Inverness thing. The restrictions on development along Tomales Bay are so tight that nothing has gone up near the water in years. The water, shallow, oyster-laden and very tidal, still laps against remarkably empty shores.

It must be the roll of the green hills and the inland reach of the bay in its elongated rift valley that convinced someone that this was like Scotland. A loch in the Highlands. A fanciful notion that just doesn't work with California poppies roadside, the smell of laurel, the red curling bark of madrone and tiny eateries displaying historic photos of before and after the last big earthquake on the San Andreas Fault beneath the bay.

But the genteel poverty thing, that seems worth exploring. When I first saw Inverness in the late 1960s the place was known as a weekend getaway for Berkeley professors. Many owned cabins there, modest wooden-slatted cabins that might, or might not, have a refrigerator. With its shade and fog and cool summers, Inverness was no place to get a tan. It was a place to get away. From students, from traffic, from one's routine. To...a place that was cool, vaguely ramshackle, anything but haute. To...now. A place where true strangers rent cabins side by side and barely say hello. I don't believe that was the Inverness of the old days. And in this sense, Inverness has grown poorer as it has grown richer.

And how did the place get richer? Oh, exploding Bay Area property values, I suppose. The eventual popularity of Point Reyes. And preservation itself. The shack, a.k.a. cottage we recently rented on the Web from the unseen proprietor of a bed and breakfast in Point Reyes ran to $200 a night. Unfortunately, I believe this attracts people who like being around $200-a-night people. This may explain why our neighbors didn't speak to us. They have the idea -- or is it my idea? -- that Inverness is exclusive. Which it is. Having excluded development along the fragile bay, and the fragile hills fronting the fragile bay, not to mention the fragile farmlands beyond the hills and the fragile watershed beyond all that, Walt's shack is exclusive in a supply-and-demand sort of way. Too bad the track lights in the bedroom don't work, and the two reading lamps in the front room might be good for casting a fishing line, but not a light...being either burned out or inoperative.

Though actually I am of two minds about the lights and the bad mattress and the bathroom off the kitchen, not to mention the dusty soup cans at the Inverness Store a few yards down the highway, not to mention the appalling goulash ladled up across the street at Vladimir's Czech restaurant, now $26 prix fixe, paper napkins included. I hope people get tired of Inverness, at least the wrong kind of people. I want the right kind of people there. I want us there. Marlou and me. It's our kind of place.

Which makes me grateful for my modest yet sustained income rolling in from a disability insurance company somewhere in the Midwest. And the health plan without which the insurance checks would be a risible drop in life's bucket. And the fact that I am alive to enjoy all this. And so is Marlou.

In early afternoon, when my van pulled into its parking space by our apartment fresh from Inverness, my shoulder and neck not hurting too much from the two-hour drive, we entered our home just long enough to down some takeout sushi and say goodbye. Marlou had her appointment with the surgeon, the one who's going to remove a rather large chunk of her liver. It's a renewable resource, liver. And so is the spirit. And so is Inverness, which keeps renewing itself and renewing us.

Someday the renewing will stop. But not in my day. No matter how many days I have left, the West Marin Agricultural Land Trust can be, well, trusted. To its trustees. Just as our cottage neighbors can be trusted to wander down our Tomales Bay dock all snooty and aloof. Classy soap, they've got in their bathroom, transparent and glycerin and wrapped in a custom bed-and-breakfast label. It's okay. Cancer hasn't stopped us, and the cottage neighbors won't either. We, and Inverness itself, will deal with them later.